I'm in the middle of building an instragram-ads-crawling webservice. I mapped my functionality's way though the REST requests in the cryptic API's documentation and, after a crapload of authorizations and mixed old and new naming conventions (adgroup vs ad, for example), I finally managed to make my way to one very important call that behaves weirdly. I explain:
Firstly, for the sake of argument, I made the following call:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/<adcreative_id>?fields=comment_count,like_count&access_token=<my_token>
It works beautifully, and I get something like this:
{
"comment_count": 4,
"like_count": 175,
"id": "<adcreative's_id>"
}
When reaching for the adcreative's comments, one of two things deterministically happen. Say I submit the following call:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6//comments?fields=message,created_at,comment_type,instagram_user&access_token=
(1) When all the post has is its caption (which the API sees as a comment as well), it sends me a perfectly good reply like:
{
"data": [
{
"message": "here goes the actual ad's caption, as written by the advertiser",
"created_at": "2016-04-22T18:36:01+0000",
"instagram_user": {
"id": "0123456789"
},
"comment_type": "CAPTION",
"id": "<actual_comment_id>"
}
]
}
(2) When the post has actual comments (any number above zero not counting the CAPTION comment), I always get an empty response:
{
"data": [
]
}
I double checked the permissions I ask the user to grant on authentication, which are currently ads_management, ads_read, page_management and read_insights. I also checked that I've authorized the involved AdAccount to use the Ads API. Lastly, I even verified that the User Account im logged in to has advertiser rights on the AdAccount I'm trying to read from.
Adding the answer from the comments. The solution in this case was to use <instagram_story_id> as opposed to <adcreative_id>.